Thursday, November 19, 2009

Avenue Hat and Handwarmers - two almost free patterns

Not long ago, Louise at Biscotte et Cie paid me the enormous compliment of inviting me to knit an exclusive hat design for her shop.

We all know how I feel about Biscotte yarns! Of course I leapt at the chance, and couldn't believe my luck when she offered me not only a blend of lambswool, angora, and cashmere - but also, my choice of solid, semi-solid, or striped.

This, my friends, is the Dream Project to which I have been alluding over the past month:

First off, I have to tell you that the yarn in question, Precieux, is even more spectacular than it sounds. I am an impatient knitter - I knit for product, not process - yet I ripped the hat out repeatedly 'to make it better'.

Yeah. Not at all to prolong the knitting experience! And there are about to be more colours, to make it even harder to resist.

Apart from trying out a top-down design, the better to rip back a few rows or add some if you discover on Christmas morning that the person you knit for has a longer or shorter head than anticipated (something that happened to me with two different hats last year) I'd been thinking of a particular stitch sequence I thought would be

satisfying to knitattractive to wearstretchy for stress-free gifting andunisex

It came out looking even lovelier than I'd imagined, thanks to the halo and the rich colour Louise is so good at creating.

When I was finally done, I realized there was enough yarn left to make handwarmers, and spent about a week trying to talk myself out of pushing aside my other urgent projects and making them instead.

No luck.

(I ripped these out more than a few times to reknit, too.)

And I'm about to order some more Precieux for myself, because I am just not ready to let go.

So: for the price of a skein of some of the most gorgeous yarn you will ever knit with, you get, free with purchase, a pattern for a hat that is warm as all get-out yet as light as can be, and offered in four sizes from children to adult,

plus a pattern for matching handwarmers offered in both a child and adult size. And you can make even the largest hat and adult handwarmers out of just one skein.

The adult handwarmers fit a guy just as comfortably as a girl - I just knew that stitch pattern would make for good stretch!